Everyone agreed.
“I have an idea,” Hajj said, his little eyes sparkling.
“Yes?” Serenity jerked forward. It was clear that he wanted it to be a secret between him and Hajj, but Hajj was no lover of secrets. He had nothing to hide, he always said.
“Apply for three thousand rolls of cloth from the government textile mill at Jinja in the name of the union. Sell the cloth on the black market, and fly ‘Hajjati’ to Rome with you,” he said, referring to Padlock. They all laughed.
“Money,” Serenity said unhappily.
“Money!” Hajj Gimbi zoomed in ironically with his booming voice.
“Money,” the other two cronies said together.
“To be on the safe side, apply for five thousand rolls. Don’t worry about money. You only have to sell the delivery note to the black-marketeers. They do the rest.”
“The State Research Bureau …,” Serenity said, half with levity, half with genuine fear.
“The State Research?” Hajj asked, as if he had never heard of them.
“The State Research!” The others took up the joke, and the laughter too.
“You are a real leader, with many delusions of grandeur,” Hajj said to Serenity. “Those boys are too busy doing more important things to notice you. Ha, ha, ha, haaaa!”
Like a good husband and a sensible man, Serenity kept everything secret. Padlock, stung by his apparent indifference to her anxiety, was pressuring him to listen to her and do something before it was too late.
“You have not even registered!” he countered as he wondered whether the next morning State Research boys were going to drag him out of his office, jam him into the trunk of a waiting car and take him to a forest, or a river, or a filthy cell.
“Do something.”
“We will see,” he said.
“ ‘We will see’ is not good enough. You know that.”
“We will see,” he reiterated for the umpteenth time. “I said, we will see.”
General Amin played his cards well. He knew that if he allowed Catholics total access to subsidized government-priced dollars from the Bank of Uganda, he would lose vital political capital. He wanted Catholics, for once, to acknowledge his importance in their life, and especially in this pilgrimage. He devised three quotas. In the first quota, he placed five thousand people, who received the necessary travel documents and dollars and were made to understand that they were the country’s official representatives. Unofficial government sources gradually let it be known that there were extra places for those who could secure foreign currency on their own; this was the second quota, composed of the elite, people with both money and connections.
The government sources warned that if any pilgrims sold government-priced dollars on the black market, they would be arrested and their passports torn to pieces. Catholics felt insulted that the government could suspect them of doing something so base. Serenity was exhilarated, Padlock dejected. The chosen five thousand were going without having to sell the clothes on their backs to pay for foreign currency! Being among the chosen ones, Serenity was in seventh heaven. The deal had paid off: he had sold the delivery note and secured the cash, and the buyers had neither pointed guns at him nor pushed him into the trunk of a car! It had been a revelation. In gratitude, he had bought Hajj Gimbi a very large goat with teats hanging almost to the ground. He also spent a weekend with Nakibuka. He bought her clothes and gifts for her children, but he did not tell her how he had made the money.
Serenity boarded an Alitalia jumbo jet with three hundred forty-nine other passengers one late afternoon. The most impressive sight he remembered was a view of Lake Victoria as they rose in the air: the lake resembled an oblong pool of quicksilver. The next morning he was in Rome, reborn, his life transformed. The city was alive, sighing and heaving under the crush of pilgrims from the world over, the ubiquitous tourists and its own dwellers.
Serenity was very interested in ancient sites, the Colosseum, the museums, the cathedrals, anything that could breathe new life into the characters he had encountered in the history lessons of his childhood. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the early Church and the Roman Empire all came alive now in a living context that linked past and present. Serenity felt strangely at home.
He stood in crowded St. Peter’s Square. Filled with wonder, Serenity ate holy bread from the hands of the aging pope, marvelling at his hooked nose and the glamour that still failed to dispel the dimness of his features, and found it hard to believe that so delicate a creature could be the head of so vast and powerful a corporation as the Catholic Church. What did this man know about him? What did he know about Catholics in Uganda? What did he know about the people who took him most seriously? Apart from feeding them dogma, what had he really ever done for them? Yet he influenced their lives as though he knew them personally!
In Serenity’s mind, the man resembled an armadillo that controlled his territory from underground, crawling occasionally to the surface, carapaced in dogma, to be seen and to confirm that he was still in control. Loaded with layers of exquisite garments and priceless jewelry, this monstrous armadillo seemed to have emerged from his hole ready to shine. He spoke with the calculated sloth of those assured of an eternal audience, and his magnificent raiment had the gleam of garments washed clean in the blood of imperial power. The holy armadillo moved with arthritic grace. His body breathed the air of sublime indifference. His demeanor oozed with the contradiction of preaching sadistic negation of the body while bedecking oneself in gold. He operated in the supremely detached ambience of holy dictators, tyrants who feared nothing, imperial despots who controlled the lives of hundreds of millions of people far away.
At the turn of the century, agents of an earlier holy armadillo had come to Uganda, locked horns with agents of other religions, got involved in bloody wars and poisoned politics with religion while the armadillo slept. Now Ugandans, descendants of those who died in those Religious Wars, were jostling to touch his successor, to kiss his ring, to be blessed by him, to be pictured with him, everything forgiven and forgotten. Serenity thought of his wife. He was annoyed that this man, whose principles and dogmas had scarred her forever and turned her into a rigid, frigid bundle of inhibitions, knew nothing about her and the troubles he had gone through in accommodating her and her implacable beliefs.
Serenity spent the nights in his hotel room, ruminating on what he had seen during the day. Richer pilgrims went out whoring. One got mugged. Another lost his way and spent the night searching for his hotel. Female pilgrims stayed in their own hotel, where some were joined by their male counterparts for wine-drenched fornication while a few others were fondled and flashed by city freaks who posed as photographers.
From his hotel window, Serenity could see whores walking the street, parading their wares, accosting men, bargaining, getting in and out of cars or simply looking bored with the waiting game. He found it curious that they were very expensive. They aroused supreme indifference in him. It was beyond him to contemplate flushing his precious black-market money down some sordid whore’s drain. He wished Nakibuka were with him, helping him to capture and savor the special moments. He ate just one meal a day to save money, but he felt filled up. He seemed to be feeding on dreams — Jesus in the desert, temptation galore, capitulation never an option.
Serenity bought souvenirs, but his heart was stolen by a bronze plaque depicting the legend of Romulus and Remus. This was what he had subconsciously come to get; this was what the blackbirds carried unseen in their beaks. In the middle was the wolf, big, dominant, her snout pointed menacingly at unseen intruders. Her large puffy teats were hanging down like strange fruits. Her eyes looked glazed with what could only be the joy and sensuousness of breastfeeding. The twins, nude and silky like hairless piglets, were sucking the diabolical milk as the wolf protected them with the arch of her body.